Bring On Your Wrecking Ball

On Monday evening, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band performed live on the Jimmy Fallon show.  At age 62, Springsteen still has no idea how to just mail in a performance.  As vital and vibrant as ever, Springsteen showed everyone once again why he's the best that ever was.  The song "Wrecking Ball," which serves as the title track for his next album (available March 6th everywhere), seemed like a throwaway romp when he performed it on the last tour, ostensibly in honor of the tearing down of the Meadowlands.  And yet, with just a few word twists, it serves as an incredibly worthy anchor to what is going to be an epic album.  In context to the rest of the album, the protagonist stands defiant telling all the forces that serve to bring him, us, down to step to the line, take their best shot.  And even when you knock down the structure, the spirit always remains.  A powerful reminder, indeed.  I can't help but see this as the rest of the story to the wide-eyed teen that was running from anything and everything some 37 years ago. Now in his mid to late 50s, having survived the rattle and hum of every day life, he now knows that you can run but you can't hide. There are forces greater then us all that can take you down even when you've tried to do everything right.  And yet, and yet, not even the wrecking ball can tear us down.  Remain resolute, if you think you've got the balls.

Enjoy this video from Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and please, please, please buy the album:

A Matter of Trust

Never has a moment in baseball made me feel more like Michael Coreleone in Godfather III then the rescission of the 50-game suspension handed down to last year’s National League MVP, Ryan Braun, when he tested positive for extremely high levels of testosterone.

Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. I thought I was through with screaming from the rooftops about how poorly baseball is run and how foolish they've been in dealing with the drugs. Weren't they getting better? Hardly.

At this point, major league baseball remians popular by accident. It has a business model that makes no sense. It has too many teams that never have a realistic chance of competing. It operates under separate sets of rules between the leagues, which is idiotic. But perhaps its biggest problem is that it is presided over by Bud Selig, The Worst Commissioner in Baseball History™, a point I’ve made before and now need to make again.

My issues with Selig stem mostly from his fragile spine. He’s never once stood up for the game in a meaningful way by staring down narrow-minded owners who care only about their bottom line and not the health of the entire sport. And even in those rare cases where he could get consensus with the owners, Selig had no ability to take on a players’ union run by short-sighted shallow thinkers over any issues of substance, including substance abuse. By not standing up, Selig has fallen for almost every issue, not the least of which was baseball’s rampant drug problem, one of the worst scandals in American sports.

Selig’s apologists point to his leadership in bettering baseball’s drug policy as proof of his effectiveness while conveniently forgetting that Selig’s conversion on this issue came not of his free will but at the business end of a gun pointed at his head by Congress.

And yet, while baseball’s drug policy is indeed far better these days along comes a case like Braun's to put baseball and its approach nearly back to square one. Losing the Braun arbitration in the way they did makes it look as though baseball is being run by Peter Griffin. Maybe that would actually be better.

The Braun case more than demonstrates that baseball's brain trust can't even handle a urine sample effectively. How can it be trusted on anything reeking of even slightly more complication?

Let’s set the background.

Braun has claimed that his elevated testosterone levels aren’t the result of illegal drug use, which seems dubious if only because I’m still waiting for the first person to test positive to actually admit that they really did ingest illegal drugs.

Braun’s argument raised questions about the integrity of the testing process and was buttressed not by his actual test results but by the inherent distrust most people have toward drug testing in the first place. Anyone who has ever been subjected to a drug test, and by now that’s most of us, always fears the mythical “false positive” test. Despite the sophistication of the testing at this point that makes it nearly impossible to get a “false positive,” the potential for a false result hangs over the program like Billy Crystal hangs over the Oscars.

And so it is, sometimes to extremes, that we let irrational fears like these drive results that don’t seem plausible. Irrational or not, however, the fact remains that whenever there is any sort of hiccup in the protocol related to procuring and then securing the urine sample the results will always be suspicious. But that's not news. Nearly every drug testing case that is lost is because of an issue related to the testing protocol, no matter how small or insignificant of an issue it might be.

Had baseball’s deep thinkers remembered this while taking a more sober view of their case and acknowledged this fact before they ever decided to suspend Braun, this mess could have been avoided and Braun, if he is a drug user, caught under circumstances that could never have been questioned.

Braun based his claim of a false positive on what his lawyers argued was a broken custody chain in the handling of his urine sample. That’s not really true, but it’s true enough, which was also enough for neutral arbitrator Shyman Das.

The reason it’s true enough is simply that the person who took the urine sample for major league baseball never bothered to read Protocol 101. The same holds for MLB’s lawyers. From the time that the sample was collected until it was shipped (not tested, but shipped) was 44 hours or nearly two full days. The protocol in baseball is that once the sample is collected it is to be shipped immediately via FedEx to baseball’s testing lab in Montreal.

When Braun’s sample was collected, it was a Friday evening and supposedly after the local FedEx office had closed. So the collector let the sample sit in a container of Tupperware on his desk for almost two days, which reminds me never to accept an invitation to eat leftovers at that collector’s house.

You don’t need to know any more about the case than that to know that baseball should have just bit its lip and thrown out the sample and either re-tested Braun or lived to fight another day. No arbitrator was ever going to sign off on the results and the punishment that comes from them under that scenario. Again, it’s the fear of a false positive that mandates there be no screw up, no matter how small or insignificant in the testing process.

Anyone who has litigated a drug case, and I’ve done several of them, knows this to be the case. Yet baseball’s lawyers convinced baseball’s management that this fact didn’t matter and now they have a mess on their hands.

How did they get to this point? Because when you look at it holistically and not necessarily legally, you pretty much come to the conclusion that Braun had something illegal in his system. So you try to make it work because suspending the reigning MVP is a pretty big get.

In fairness to the collector, it wasn’t as if Braun peed directly into the Tupperware container. Braun peed into one of those brown bottles and handed it over. The collector immediately placed a seal over it, put that sealed bottle into a packet and sealed that packet as well and then put the packet into a FedEx box that he likewise sealed. To that point the protocol was followed and most of us know the routine. It’s just that with the FedEx office closed, the collector held onto it for 44 hours before sending it along. Once it arrived in Montreal, everything was completely in tact and sealed. There was no evidence that any of the seals had been tampered with or, by extension, that the sample was tainted.

That's pretty powerful stuff. But where major league baseball screwed up was in testing Braun at a time of day when the sample couldn’t be immediately shipped, though as Lester Munson, writing for ESPN, noted, Braun’s attorneys more or less debunked baseball’s claim that the FedEx office wasn’t open by highlighting several other FedEx offices nearby that were.

Because the sample sat in a sealed pouch for two days at the collector's house instead of in a lab, that raised more then enough doubt in the mind of the arbitrator on an issue that is fraught with doubts anyway. With the test discredited Braun’s suspension had to be overturned.

It's understandable how baseball got into this predicament. You combine a seemingly guilty looking player with a baseball hierarchy known more for missteps then efficient execution you end up with a recipe that yields a result pretty much in line with what they got. Yet if they had tested Braun a day earlier or maybe two days later, either of which would have been at a time when they could have found an open FedEx office, they could have nailed Braun and, in turn, looked serious about finally ridding the sport of drugs.

As it is, they look foolish instead. Maybe now Selig will understand that simply saying you have a world class drug testing program doesn’t make it so. As for ridding the sport of drugs, we’ll this is certainly a step backward. Unwittingly, by virtue of their own hubris, major league baseball has created the impression that they can’t be trusted. And that, really, is the sad legacy that Selig has written for the sport he claims to love.

Budget Fillers

There was a time in Cleveland when Jim Thome, Manny Ramirez and Omar Vizquel formed the heart of a team that gave Indians fans their most significant reason to cheer in decades. They were great players growing into the prime of their careers that several times put the Indians on the precipice of a World Series title that now seems further away then ever.

But players like Thome, Ramirez and Vizquel were never going to spend their careers in Cleveland. We can bitch about the reasons why but the truth is that the identity of a particular player and a particular team is as outdated as the reserve clause.

One of the byproducts of the system that Marvin Miller sold first to the players and eventually to the owners was a revolving door concept of player movement. You take two greedy parties—players and owners—whose economic interests naturally clash and eventually you end up a league full of players who, if there's any length to their careers, each probably average having played with 4 to 5 different teams by the time those careers are over.

If the Indians didn’t create the concept of “small market team” then they were at least at the forefront of the concept. When baseball’s runaway financial structure, driven by the kinds of dollars teams were willing to throw at players like Thome and Ramirez in particular, became too dizzying of a ride for less heeled owners around the league, teams either had to find a better way to make use of the money they had or become, well, the Kansas City Royals.

So for the Indians, like their West Coast cousins, the Oakland As, it was easy to say goodbye to players they never intended to keep and replace them with someone who might vaguely replicate their production at 1/10^th of the price.

As a result, every off season in Cleveland is filled not with splashy free agent signingsbut a smattering of goodbyes followed by acquisitions like Casey Kotchman, Kevin Slowey and Cristian Guzman. Even Derek Lowe fits the profile. It’s the only way that the Indians can think of to keep a budget within reason while still turning a profit for their owners.

But it’s a myth that only teams like Cleveland and Oakland do these sorts of things. The Indians and As may do more of this kind of barrel scraping then others, but there isn’t a team in the major leagues that isn’t in the market for an aging veteran pitcher with a history of success and coming off of arm surgery. Heck, Bartolo Colon was a big part of the Yankees’rotation last season.

That’s why it’s fascinating to watch when players like Thome, Ramirez and Vizquel, players who were such a big part of local fans’ dreams, face their comeuppance. No longer are they prizes to whom teams are still willing to throw indiscriminate money toward but instead they are, in effect, some other team’s Kotchman, Slowey or Guzman.

When the Oakland As signed Ramirez earlier this week, it more than drove home the point. Ramirez is mostly a discredited two time violator of baseball’s drug policy. He could be signed on the cheap because he grew fat and remained stupid and he has a 50-game suspension that still must be served.

But the other reason the As would take a chance on Ramirez is for the same reason that aging baby boomers will still buy tickets to a Paul McCartney concert. McCartney may be 70 years old but his voice is still good enough to make you remember when it was coming out of a 25 year old body.

So it is with Ramirez. He could get as big as Prince Fielder but as long as the sweet batting stroke remains in tact, and As general manager Billy Beane assures us it is, then there is very little to be lost except maybe a half million dollars if Ramirez is a complete bust. As cheap as teams can be, they still think little of giving away $500,000 to a player who could credibly occupy a final roster spot.

Still there is a certain pathetic underpinning to it all, isn’t there? Assuming Ramirez’s lack of self-discipline extended to matters financial, the assumption is that Ramirez signed because he needs the money. He never came across as someone who loved the game given his abject indifference toward its formalities for so many years. It's the sad epilogue really to the far headier days when he and his agent dangled the disingenuous notion of his re-signing with Cleveland under a “hometown discount” before maxing out with the Boston Red Sox.

Take away the two drug violations and Thome’s story closely parallels Ramirez’s. He left Cleveland in much the same way, with his agent trying to portray Indians’ management as the bad guys for not paying him his “value” even as he chased the maximum cash that any other team was willing to pay him knowing full well it wouldn't be Cleveland.

Thome had great years with the Phillies and became a very solid 1 percenter in the process. But age and weight and injuries caught up with Thome and for the last several years he’s been a hobbled mercenary looking for a few bucks and a way to extend his career. He’s now on his fourth team since 2006.

It, too, seems just a tad pathetic. And yet there is something gratifying by the way Thome, like Ramirez, has had to humble himself to those he exploited now that he's just another spare part, a plug hole in some team’s budget, as he clings to baseball even after making well in excess of $100 million during his career.

Then there’s Vizquel. He didn’t get there in the same way as Ramirez or Thome but he’s there all the same. Never the splashy free agent that either Ramirez or Thome was it could well be argued that his value as a baseball player was at least as high as either of them.

Vizquel didn’t leave Cleveland because he was chasing free agent dollars. He left because general manager Mark Shapiro kicked him, his 37 year old body and his relatively modest $6 million a year salary to the curb in favor of a potentially promising Jhonny Peralta who worked much more cheaply. Since then Vizquel went on to start for the San Francisco Giants for years but now finds himself as a 45 year old trying to keep a million dollar salary coming in. As long as he can still field the ball on occasion and doesn’t make waves, he’s the perfect plug hole in some team’s budget as well.

That Vizquel still clings to baseball as a bit player is a sad end to a glorious career. There's no reason not to take the money that some team wants to throw your way but it really is rather sad that in the pursuit of another dollar a player of his stature is willing to tarnish an otherwise glorious career.

In retrospect, it all seems rather ludicrous to have gotten so excited about trying to retain at least Ramirez and Thome, even as I still question Shapiro’s decision to jettison Vizquel when he did. Even if they all had remained in Cleveland and had put up exactly the same numbers as they did for their new teams, there is no certainty that the Indians would have won a World Series.

But even more to the point is simply that they more then prove that as much as major league baseball markets its superstars, the only real way to remain committed as a fan is to love the game more. Players come and go quickly, particularly these days, and their self interests will always break your hearts. But the game itself still endures and is the reason to watch. It’s the only way to be a fan in Cleveland and, frankly, every other city with a major or minor league team.

Lingering Items--Oncoming Bus Edition

One of the abiding questions for beleaguered Cleveland sports fans is whether or not LeBron James and Art Modell really belong in the same conversation. It's easy to equate the two sports pariahs because the similarities can be striking in the oddest ways.

From the classless and graceless exits to the sorry state in which they left their local fans it's quite natural to want to bury each up to his neck in his own private chamber  in Cleveland sports hell, drip honey on their foreheads and watch as rodents and fire ants pick them clean.

You'll never witness me asking anyone to forgive LeBron James for the shiv he stuck in this town's collective backs. But if presented with the Hobson's choice of pulling one or the other from in front of a RTA bus driven by a meth-addicted escaped felon, I'm pulling LeBron away every time.  Sorry, Artie.

And this was before LeBron's recent bout of maturity in the form of acknowledging that his noisy withdrawal from the local sports scene was a mistake. I don't begrudge any athlete chasing whatever dream comes his way. For James, the money was going to be there wherever he decided to play. Like any generational athlete what drives him is the elusive goal of immortality. In sports that's always been defined by championships.

What chafes about James is that ultimately he is not who we thought he was. We convinced ourselves he was Michael Jordan on limited evidence that came in the form of an ability to do things with a basketball that most of us can never fathom. When he left, we imagined with it all the championships he'd take with him. 

But the sad truth when it comes to James is that he's never going to be who he thinks he is.  He's not a king and he's certainly not Jordan. He's an overgrown kid who just happens to be really good at his sport. If or when that championship comes his way, he'll never own it like Jordan or Kobe. He'll have earned it on someone else's back.

Saying all this isn't supposed to serve as criticism, which is why James gets a pass when the only choice is to save the lesser of two evils. James is not a leader but instead one of the most talented followers in history. His inability to convince his superstar friends to play in Cleveland instead of Miami (although I blanche at the notion of Chris Bosh as a superstar) is all the proof you need of that.  His playoff collapses are just the icing on the cake.

In that context James chasing his dreams where the real alpha dogs take them makes sense even if it hurts. James reached the conclusion long before the rest of us that there was no reason to build a team around him. He works far better when it's built around someone else.

So James throwing the locals a bone by suggesting he could see himself playing in Cleveland somewhere down the road is pretty much the same thing Jim Thome said on his way out of town the first time, too. It was the kind of empty statement that athletes say to get to the next question.

Besides I don't expect it to ever come to pass anyway unless James ends up like Thome, a mercenary playing out the string of on a great career but unable to call it quits. But even then I still doubt it, at least if Dan Gilbert still owns the team. He strikes me as the kind of guy that James is not--driven to success and motivated by slights.  And that’s a good thing.

***

James doesn't exactly warrant a pass even as his situation at least has a thread of schoolboy logic to it. Modell, on the other hand, is a far different cat. In simple terms, he ran a franchise into the ground through the kind of stupidity the Lerner family can only dream about and then uprooted it for the sole purpose of trying to preserve it for the benefit of his idiot son.

There has been a lot of revisionist history afoot when it comes to Modell, mostly led by Modell directly or through those he has paid to be his dishonest messengers. Modell was always quick to try to blame a city he thought was more preoccupied with the Indians as the driving force to what he has claimed was an inevitability. 

But nothing about Modell moving the Browns was the least bit inevitable. Owning a NFL franchise is the same as owning a license to print money. You can be Dan Snyder stupid and still keep each of your loved ones in Gulfstreams. The only thing you can't be is Art Modell stupid and before you dismiss this as merely snark, remember that despite the ludicrous stimulus package that the city of Baltimore and the state of Maryland gave Modell he still went through it like a brokenhearted teenage goes through Mars bars and had to sell the team anyway.

Modell could have sold the team to a hundred different buyers without ever sending Browns fans afloat. If he didn't like his deal with the city there were dozens of others who would have found a way to make it work in Cleveland. He moved the team because he was selfish and amoral. He could not have cared less about the psychological or financial impact that selfishness had on the thousands that helped finance a lifestyle that he didn't deserve.

Modell was a business owner who bled the city and its patrons for as long as he could and then skipped town to do it again somewhere else. James on the other hand was and always will be just a really good player. His leaving was felt because he’s an otherworldly talent and he was classless in his exit but the scale is just not the same and never will be.

***

Putting James and Modell in their proper historical context makes me tend to appreciate the entry level ineptitude of Randy Lerner a little more both for what it is and what it isn't.

 

The Browns have been awful under the Lerner family ownership. To that there can be no doubt. But at least we have the ability to scream from the rooftops about it. We've seen the alternative in Cleveland and as between an incompetently run franchise and none at all, there really is no choice.

No matter how poorly Randy Lerner has run the franchise, no matter how frustrating his impetuousness has been, there's virtually no likelihood that he abandons the city.  The one thing he has that trumps all is money and while even that can be fleeting, there's no chance he squanders a NFL team like Modell did.

That's really quite good news actually, probably the best of all news. The team is on solid financial footing.  Under Modell it was always a shaky existence.

The problem now is the abject inability to build off that solid base. Lerner's best qualities as an owner are his passion and his willingness to write a check. Unfortunately those are his only qualities as well. This team is still light years away from being a top tier outfit and so much of that starts with Lerner's poor stewardship.

Still, as much as Lerner frustrates me, he also makes me glad that he was willing to take over when his father passed away. While this town and this team could always do much better, we know firsthand it could be much worse.  And that's always something I try to remember each time the Pittsburgh Steelers treat us take our temperatures rectally twice each year.

***

 

With NFL draft speculation in full swing now, this week’s question to ponder:  Are the Browns’ needs at quarterback so vast as compared to the rest of its needs that it’s worth trading two number one picks for Robert Griffin III?

The Path to a College Football Playoff

The dominoes continue to fall and now it won’t be long before college football finally has a legitimate playoff to determine its national champion. The news that the Big Ten is noodling various playoff scenarios carries with it the significant implication that it not only can be swayed but that it will. To this point the Big Ten served as both the enemy of progress and the 10,000 pound elephant in the playoff advocates’ ointment.

There is this overwhelming unmet need of so many to crown a national champion in Division I football on the field. Initially it stemmed from the distinct possibility that the two ranking groups, the Associated Press and the United Press International Coaches Poll, since taken over by USA Today, left open the possibility that there could be, God forbid, a difference of opinion on which team really was the theoretical best for that year. Indeed they did disagree at various times, though it should be noted that it didn't result in rain falling upward or dogs playing with cats.

Despite all the supposedly smart men in hideous blazers paid by universities to wring hands and scratch brows over all things related to college football, no one could quite figure out how to deal with an incredibly antiquated and increasingly irrelevant bowl system that seemed to be an insurmountable hurdle to a national playoff system.

The preservation of this goofy bowl system, which is really a vestige of a bygone day where it was difficult and expensive for teams to travel anywhere but locally, always has been a curious thing. There’s no overriding reason, for example, why the Rose Bowl needs to continue to exist except to enhance the pockets of those who run it. Sure it’s tradition. So was the Maypole dance. Everything has its time and its expiration date.

What started out as a nice way for a handful of teams to celebrate an end to a football season has since morphed into an impossibly controlled crazy quilt of games that no longer celebrate any real success. All it takes to become bowl eligible is for a team to win half its games in a given season and as the number of bowl games propagate faster then Kris Kardashian Jenner the relevance gets even harder to find. Bowl games are now the equivalent of participation trophies that little leagues hand out so that no kid is left to feel bad because his team didn’t win.

So a legitimate football playoff season has been hamstrung by the abject refusal of anyone with any guts to admit that the king hasn’t been wearing any clothes for at least two decades. Thus we’re left to act like the bowl games matter and that taking a back hoe to them would be tantamount to tearing at the very fabric that holds this country together.

Certainly the Big Ten’s Jim Delany, whose title is commissioner but who has always seen himself as much more of a deity, has been the biggest advocate for the current bowl system. In the past he has vowed that the Big Ten wouldn’t ever consider approving any sort of playoff system. I wonder what’s turned his head?

Well, let’s start with the fact that his conference has become mostly shut out from winning a national championship for the last 6 years. When the SEC sent two of its teams to play for this year’s national championship, Delany had to see it as the disaster it really was. The nation was left to witness a redux of sorts of the SEC Championship game, Delany's conference was losing its competitiveness and the spotlight and the situation doesn’t look to change any time soon.

But there is more. When horse-and-buggy thinkers like Delany put the clamps on any talks of a legitimate playoff system it’s not as if others didn’t still try to make something, anything happen. Thus was born probably the single dumbest creation in college football history next to the flying wedge: the Bowl Championship Series.

Through a convoluted point system that weighs everything from a team’s ranking in the more traditional polls to the color of its uniforms, the BCS tries to force a matchup of the two best teams in the country in one super, duper bowl game that takes place at the end of a particularly hellish week of other BCS-related bowls run by the very idiots whose interests run counter to the rest of the college football fan base.

The hope I guess was that by having the BCS align with the traditional bowls and their traditional conference alignments and then throwing millions of dollars at the conference anyone with any authority would look the other way at the inequities it caused. It's worked, sort of, except that all anyone really does is complain about the way it works.

It’s not just that the BCS system ignores teams/conferences it doesn’t deem sponge worthy that causes the problems, although that’s a big part of it. It’s the fact that despite all the rigor of its ranking process in the end those same guys in the hideous blazers get to ignore those rankings when deciding who will participate in the bowl they represent. The draft used by most fantasy football leagues makes more sense.

How did this lead to Delany’s evolution on the subject of a playoff? How about the fact that Michigan got to play in a BCS bowl game which Michigan State, easily the conference’s second best team and a team that handled Michigan during the regular season, did not.

No one outside of Ann Arbor thought this was fair and I suspect Delany heard an earful from most of the rest of the conference. The selection of Michigan instead of Michigan State by the Sugar Bowl was indefensible. It wasn’t based on on-field accomplishment but more so on which team supposedly traveled better. That’s code for which team had the more affluent alumni base that would buy tickets to a game that was played for absolutely no stakes and had even less meaning then that. And don’t get me started on Virginia Tech. How they played in anything beyond the Meinke Car Care Bowl remains a bigger mystery then Newt Gingrich.

In truth, it was only a matter of time before the inequities of college football started impacting the Big Ten in a negative way. Until recently, the Big Ten has had it mostly its way and had absolutely no incentive to do anything different then simply being the petulant child who refuses to get into the car so that the rest of the family can leave for vacation.

But the thing we know most about college football these days is that it’s not about the athletes and it’s not about the students. It’s about the money. State legislatures everywhere continually squeeze the budgets of the public universities that taxpayers help support and university presidents are forced to find new revenue streams as well as ways to widen the existing streams.

It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that Delany’s whispered sanctioning of a playoff system comes with the notion that it would involve an additional home game for the top two seeds. The best teams in the Big Ten have stadiums the size of Rhode Island and fill them with an ease that even a touring Bruce Springsteen would admire. That’s a lot of extra money for a conference that splits its proceeds among all its members.

Now nothing comes easy when it comes to Delany and the Big Ten, which is why their kicking around of a 4-team playoff is akin to dipping one's toe in the tub to test the temperature. But Delany is smart enough to know that you can't be a little bit pregnant and understands full well the history of how the NCAA's basketball tournament went from a sleepy little 8-team tournament to the 68 team monstrosity it is today. Once you start there's no going back.

And just like that the bowl system is no longer the insurmountable hurdle to a more equitable system. It will take time and it won't be perfect immediately but make no mistake that the path is being paved. Who knew, except everybody, that money would solve all problems?

Lingering Items--Winter Doldrums Edition

 When the Super Bowl ends sometime around 10 p.m. EDT this Sunday it will mark not just the end of a very curious but interesting football season. It is also will mark the beginning of the dullest period of the sports season.

Fortunately, the dull times don’t last too long as it’s at most a few weeks until major league teams report to spring training. Until then, though, you have time to catch up on Mad Men before the next season starts in March or waste your time with meaningless games in whatever sport you follow.

The Ohio State Buckeyes men’s basketball team, talented and athletic and a real contender for a national championship, have a difficult schedule ahead over the last half of their regular season, but the presence of a Big Ten tournament and the knowledge that the Buckeyes will be in the NCAA tournament come March render these upcoming games mildly interesting and overwhelmingly irrelevant, like the Plain Dealer on a good day.

Far worse, though, is the NBA season and not just because the Cavaliers are still in the early stages of a major rebuild which, if history is any indication, is a minimum 8 year process. If there are any NHL fans in this area, and I suppose there probably are a few, nothing much interesting happens this time of year, either. Like the NBA, more teams make the playoffs then should and only a few teams really have a chance of taking the crown. That much was known months ago and not much has changed in the interim.

So what we’re left with for the next few weeks is to engage in postseason speculation when it comes to the Browns, preseason bitching when it comes to the Indians and in season indifference when it comes to the Cavs.

**

Let’s start with the Cavs. With them, the current mostly boring debate surrounds whether or not the team should just continue on a losing path for the rest of the season in order to secure a better draft pick. Right now, the Cavs would make the playoffs and wouldn’t make the lottery. It’s a situation known as NBA purgatory. There are only a few teams with a legitimate chance to make the NBA Finals. There are a few others that are close to that level and thus would likely benefit from the seasoning that the NBA playoffs bring. The rest of the teams though are just spinning their wheels in the most unproductive manner possible in purgatory.

There is no good that could come from the Cavs making the playoffs this season. They are simply too far away to reap any tangible benefit from playing in the postseason. If/when the Cavs are able to cobble together enough pieces and parts to make a far more legitimate run, most of the players on the current team will be playing elsewhere. In other words, getting playoff experience under their belts, to the extent that matters, won’t benefit the Cavs anyway.

All that said, of course, it’s ridiculous to think about tanking an entire NBA season. Professional athletes for the most part are imbued with a strong sense of pride and competitiveness. They may know their team sucks, but when the whistle blows they still tend to play hard if only because they don’t want to be embarrassed.

There are notable exceptions to this of course. The Cavs, for example, have had rosters full of players that mailed it in for millions a year. But this Cavs roster isn’t of that ilk. They aren’t talented enough to compete at the highest levels but neither are they jaded enough to spend the rest of the season going through the motions.

I don’t think that fans need to worry anyway. Water finds its level and for this Cavs team, that’s somewhere far closer to the ceiling then the upper floors. The lottery looks secure for another season.

**

The Indians, on the other hand, are about to embark on another gun fight once again wielding a dull knife. They spent another offseason gathering spare parts and broken hearts through barter while the key competition around them acquired assets with cash.

It’s to their detriment but not their fault that they didn’t acquire Prince Fielder and his expanding waist line. It was an ill advised move by the Detroit Tigers. But it does emphasize why the Indians will always fall short of filling the gaps they need. They are essentially playing in a different league when it comes to better financed teams.

The acquisition of Fielder by the Tigers is interesting because it somewhat dispels the notion of small market vs. big market teams. I don’t think of Detroit as a big market anymore although that tide could be turning along with the fortunes of the auto industry. They're just a small market with a big market thinking owner.

That said, I don’t recommend that any team, least of all the Indians, overpay someone like Fielder who looks like he took training tips from an online consortium run by CC Sabathia and Dinner Bell Mel Turpin. The contract the Tigers committed to for Fielder will be a bigger millstone around their neck then the Travis Hafner contract has been around the Indians’.

I fully expect that Fielder will have some good numbers for the next year or two and some of that will come at the expense of the Indians as they try to claw back into relevance. But come years 6, 7, 8 and 9, if not years 3, 4 and 5, someone in Detroit is going to lose his job for green lighting Project Fielder for $200+ million.

Meanwhile, back at the corner of Carnegie and Ontario, the Indians are putting on their usual offseason flourish designed to systematically lower expectations as part of their overriding goal each year to under promise and over deliver.

Indeed that’s why last season felt like such a revelation. With nothing promised, the Indians easily exceeded expectations. The problem is that with the limited bit of a success comes the implied obligation to further upgrade. Instead fans received the same warmed over players that can be had on the cheap as they rehab from injuries. About the only thing different from any number of seasons past is that the Indians applied that same criteria to one of their own, Grady Sizemore.

The key word in every Indians’ offseason is “if,” as in, “if Grady Sizemore can stay healthy” or “if Kevin Slowey can stay healthy” or, well, you get the picture. But as we know full well by not, most of the “ifs” become “buts” and the Indians, by virtue of their inaction, will again be scrambling to develop other revenue sources besides the more traditional route of good play-inspired attendance. And the circle goes unbroken.

**

The Browns have underwhelmed thus far in the off season, but it’s early. They're is still time to massively disappoint. The only move of consequence was the addition of failed former head coach Brad Childress as the offensive coordinator.

But like most things that happen in Berea, it looks like it will come with the odd condition in the form of not allowing Childress to exercise the full benefits of his title by being the team’s play caller. But perhaps Childress was chosen exactly for that reason. As Andy Reid's offensive coordinator in Philadelphia, Childress didn't call plays then either.

Still, it smacks of a compromise reached between head coach Pat Shurmur and his boss, team president Mike Holmgren. Shurmur doesn’t appear to want to relinquish what little power he has and Holmgren needs to quell a fan insurrection over the awful state of the offense. Who better to step in and play the part of a well paid patsy then another client of both Shurmur’s and Holmgren’s and Tom Heckert's agent, Bob Lamonte, the out of work Childress?

Like most compromises of this nature, its structure suggests failure and not success. If the Browns need an offensive coordinator, and they do, then hire one and let him do the job. The last thing this team needs is another consultant, which is what Childress essentially has signed on for.

This is the kind of thing that really is starting to grate on the nerves of fans when it comes to Holmgren. Brought in to make tough decisions, he continuously backs away at the sign of any internal resistance. He kept Eric Mangini on for a year because Mangini literally pleaded to Holmgren to spare him the ax. It was nice for Mangini but awful for the fans and the progress of the franchise.

When he brought in Shurmur, who hadn’t been a head coach at any level, Holmgren allowed Shurmur to control the narrative by suggesting that he could handle both head coaching duties and the job of first assistant. It only sounds reasonable if the Browns were trying to cut costs on the number of assistants, but then when have the Browns ever been on that kind of austerity plan? They trend in the opposite direction, doling out money to meaningless coaches long since gone.

Armed with empirical proof that Shurmur (or any head coach) is ill suited to do the job of two coaches at once, Holmgren nonetheless again backed away from forcing Shurmur to relinquish some control. This can only mean more of the same for next year. If Childress lasts the entire season under this construct I’ll be amazed.

As for upgrading the roster, the first thing the Browns need to decide is which of their free agents they want to pursue. It would seem like D’Qwell Jackson and Phil Dawson are layups. More interesting is running back Peyton Hillis. Heckert is now leaking it to the media that the Browns do want Hillis back.

Hillis, when healthy, is exactly the kind of running back most teams need these days. While the presence of a running game is still important to the overall effectiveness of an offense, attitudes have changed on exactly what a presence means. There can be no doubt, for example, that a team does not need a Walter Peyton or a Barry Sanders to be successful. Quick, name me the starting running backs for the New England Patriots and the New York Giants.

Hillis is exactly the kind of effective no-name player that most teams look to have on board, as long as he doesn't cost too much. His problem is that he is injury-prone. He plays football like Grady Sizemore plays baseball and it leads to more injuries and less effectiveness.

The injuries have hurt Hillis’ bargaining power, but not in the same way they hurt Sizemore’s. Because there’s very little guaranteed money in the NFL, the chances are much better that a team would be willing to sign Hillis to a long-term contract. Sizemore couldn’t sniff anything more than the one-year deal the Indians offered him.

If Hillis is lost to free agency, it won’t be a major blow. I like his game, but he’s fungible with backs like Chris Ogbonnaya, a point that will become more evident when the Browns develop a better right side of the offensive line and employ credible receivers. At that point they’ll become far more pass oriented, like the rest of the league, with just a dash of running thrown in to keep teams honest.

**

The other Browns story that remains in the background concerns the fate of former Plain Dealer beat reporter Tony Grossi. The PD’s public editor, Ted Diadiun, gave a rather farcical account of what he termed a painful but necessary decision to demote Grossi, as I anticipated in my earlier column on this subject.

Diadiun pulled out the old “standards” card and essentially suggested that it wasn’t Grossi’s views of Browns owner Randy Lerner that got him in trouble but the fact that he expressed them publicly. Apparently the Plain Dealer discourages its sports reporters from having opinions.

Diadiun is making a distinction without a difference. Irrespective of whether Grossi expressed the opinion publicly, the fact of the matter is that he didn’t respect Lerner and that didn’t seem to matter to the PD until Grossi said it out loud.

And for what it’s worth, I’m not buying the whole “inadvertent tweet” defense Grossi offered in order to save his job. Maybe Grossi did mean to respond only privately but the fact remains that he didn’t and it doesn’t matter anyway. Whether he made his views of Lerner known publicly or privately is irrelevant. He held the opinion and it did impact in some fashion on his coverage. That isn’t a sin because every reporter has an opinion on his subject matter and many times it isn’t favorable. So be it.

Indeed, I think it’s cowardly for Grossi to try and hide behind a defense that relies on the phrase “inadvertent tweet”, two words that shouldn’t ever be uttered consecutively, by the way. He feels that way, he said it, end of story. But even more cowardly is the journalistic yarn the PD is hiding behind in order to assuage the feelings of a pathetic and irrelevant billionaire and his ineffective and weak first lieutenant.

The Plain Dealer demonstrated, to the detriment of the rest of its staff, that when the going gets tough, the reporters get tossed.

**

With the Super Bowl upcoming and Bill Belichick further affirming his status as one of the all time great head coaches in NFL history comes this week’s question to ponder: When Art Modell hired Belichick, he said it would be the last head coach he’d ever hire. If Modell has stuck to it, would he now be in the Hall of Fame?

Pathetic and Irrelevant

When the obituary of the Cleveland Plain Dealer is written, and it will be sooner rather than later, don’t be surprised if the words “pathetic” and “irrelevant” appear somewhere in the first 10 words or so to describe the reasoning behind its demise.

Already a shadow of its former glorious self, the Plain Dealer will be done in by no shortage of irony and perhaps the tipping point will turn out to be their pathetic but hardly irrelevant response to the apparently former PD Browns beat reporter Tony Grossi's tweet about Browns owner Randy Lerner.

The back story here is that Lerner, who gives interviews about as often as the Browns have winning seasons, did grant one to the fawning, preening troll-like blowhard who occupies the afternoon drive-time slot for the Browns’ flag ship station, WTAM. As interviews go, it was, to borrow a few choice words, pathetic and irrelevant.

Lerner wasn’t asked anything remotely challenging or controversial and he complied spectacularly by not saying say much interesting, he never does. His tone was mostly flat-lined, matching note for note his stewardship of a franchise that, to borrow a few choice words, has been pathetic and irrelevant for more than a decade. In short, Lerner’s coming out was the non-event of this year's Berea social scene. So be it.

Grossi, likely frustrated that his status as the longest tenured Browns beat reporter didn’t give him the same access to Lerner and hence the opportunity to actually ask questions and demand answers, tweeted that Lerner is a “pathetic figure, the most irrelevant billionaire in the world.”

This, of course, probably angered someone inside of Berea, though I doubt Lerner much paid attention. My guess is that it was the public relations director. Maybe it was Mike Holmgren, who just weeks ago railed against the negative attitude of the media and essentially vowed to do something about it.

It doesn’t matter. Someone got the word back to the Plain Dealer about Grossi’s tweet and the editors there jumped into panic mode. Grossi was forced to remove the tweet, apologize to Lerner and await his fate like a petulant child who just spray painted the cat and was now waiting for dad to come home and mete out the punishment.

Well that punishment came in the form of his removal from the Browns’ beat, according to multiple sources. No one at the Plain Dealer is saying much about it, hiding for now behind the kind of “no comment” comment that they detest from others with something to hide. If/when they do say something, it will be along the lines of what they already said when they discovered the tweet, that his actions were inappropriate as they then utter vague references about compromised integrity or some other such horseshit.

There’s something very peculiar about newspapers, the so-called champions of free speech everywhere. For voracious First Amendment advocates, they have awfully thin skins. Maybe they’re just jittery about their business prospects.

It’s actually odd for me to take up the banner for Grossi because I never felt like he was all that good of a beat writer to begin with. At this point in his career, and perhaps jaded by years of watching, to borrow a few choice words, pathetic and irrelevant football being played on the lakefront, Grossi became satisfied with perfunctory analysis and lazy reporting. His editors and audience alike yawned their indifference.

He was repeatedly scooped, like many Plain Dealer sports writers tend to be, by harder working reporters at smaller newspapers or, God forbid, bloggers. Perhaps his biggest flaw, though, was that he never had much interesting to say. My sense always was that he had readers because of his platform and not because of his talent.

Any of those would have been good enough reasons to can Grossi and you wouldn’t have heard a peep out of me. But the Plain Dealer, having tolerated his mediocrity for years, has long since lost the argument that Grossi should be fired now because he was lousy at his job.

Instead, they took a much more interesting approach, claiming essentially that it was the freestyling ways of the internets and social media that made it impossible for Grossi to do his job effectively anymore. Why? Because he had the temerity to call it as he saw it when it came to Lerner? What happened to truth as a defense?

Lerner, frankly, is a pathetic figure and an irrelevant billionaire. Whether he’s the most irrelevant billionaire in the world can’t be measured empirically but let’s grant Grossi the latitude that Lerner is in the top 10. The point, though, is that none of this is news anyway, except maybe to the owners or editors of the Plain Dealer who apparently have been too busy trying to scour up advertisers and subscribers to pay attention to such small matters as the disintegration of a key economic driver of the city that the Browns are or at least should be.

Lerner’s ownership of the Browns has been a disaster. He’s treated the Browns like some sort of aquatic experiment where he keeps buying various kinds of exotic fish and throwing them in the tank together to see if they can survive together. About every two years or so, he’s forced to buy more fish when his last experiment didn't work. The next time he shows even a modicum of leadership of the franchise will be the first.

If this hurts his feelings, or if someone pointing this out hurts his feelings, then he should get out of the game. By holding on to the franchise he voluntarily put himself in a position to be criticized. Yet I really doubt that it did hurt his feelings. First of all, he’d have to demonstrate he has any. Secondly, he’d have to demonstrate that he even read Grossi’s tweet, which I doubt, or cared enough about Grossi's opinion to even voice his displeasure.

It’s important to the underpinnings of this story to harp on what a lousy owner Lerner has been because it completely eviscerates any argument the brass at the Plain Dealer could conger that Grossi’s integrity as a journalist was somehow compromised by a supposedly inappropriate tweet.

Are they mad that Grossi feels the way he does about Lerner or just the fact that he said it publicly? For these purposes, the answer doesn’t matter. If Grossi’s integrity was compromised it was done so long before he made the supposedly offending tweet and yet he’s remained on the beat for years.

But I doubt that Grossi’s integrity was compromised anyway. He’s been on the Browns beat since 1984 and has seen the same things we’ve all seen, but from a much better view. Lerner’s pathetic and irrelevant ownership of the Browns provides the significant context to why the team itself has been pathetic and irrelevant for so long. It’s part of each and every crappy coaching hire, each and every crappy draft and each and every crappy loss. It's the story that he was paid to write in the first place.

Let’s also not forget that this is sports and not politics, though the fossils that teach journalism on college campuses, assuming it’s even still offered as a curriculum, would argue that the standards are the same. Maybe they should be, but they most certainly are not. Sports reporters, particularly those covering the teams on a daily basis for any media outlet, have always been given a much wider berth by their editors to mix fact and opinion in a story then the reporter covering city hall. It’s only when those editors become embarrassed by the children they let run loose on the sports beat embarrass them at cocktail parties that they decide to act as if the same rules apply.

But it’s also a measure of what these same internets have brought us that the landscape of journalism has changed. There’s a reason that this web site, and many like it, get so many visitors each day. People are clamoring for a different, fresher perspective, one that isn’t afraid to mix fact and opinion or that is otherwise not bound by some of the conventions of an aging print media.

Grossi's little foray into Twitter, with the ongoing approval of his editors, was the equivalent of dipping a pinky toe in the Atlantic. If the Plain Dealer had been smart, they would have answered the call from whatever faceless Browns official complained and said “welcome to 2012. This is not your father's Plain Dealer.”

That doesn’t mean there aren’t standards, but it does mean those standards have evolved. The only ones that haven’t seemed to notice are the editors of the Plain Dealer, which they amply demonstrated here.

It’s funny. The Plain Dealer will survive the demotion of Grossi but they won’t survive overall. because they never could recognize that the same thought process that brought them to making the decision on Grossi is the same thought process that is making their newspaper increasingly more pathetic and irrelevant.

The Complications of Life

The death of former Penn State football head coach Joe Paterno is a reminder, if nothing else, of how complicated life really can be.

In most respects, Paterno lived a life worth emulating. In other ways, though, he became a tragic figure with the fatal flaw of not knowing exactly when to say when.

In a tribute broadcast by ESPN, Jeremy Schaap pulled out a revealing Paterno quote to explain why he hung on for as long as he did. Paterno said he wouldn’t retire because of Paul “Bear” Bryant, the long time head coach at Alabama. Mere weeks after retiring from Alabama, Bryant suffered a massive heart attack and died, having lost, apparently the will to live once his coaching days ended.

And so it was with Paterno. He stayed long past his sell date for the most understandably selfish reason of all: he feared his own death. Despite a loving and devoted family, including 5 children and 17 grandchildren; despite a legacy of accomplishment and philanthropy; despite, really, having squeezed as much life into his decaying frame as humanely possible, Paterno refused to retire because the loss of the one thing that sustained him above all others would kill him.

In the end, we’ll never know if that’s true though we certainly have every reason to believe that his firing and the loss of the only job he ever really knew, coupled with the awful circumstances surrounding it, sapped Paterno of any remaining fight left in his body. His advanced age and broken spirit prevented him from taking on the vestiges of a supposedly mild form of lung cancer, to which he succumbed mere weeks after its diagnosis.

The last interview that Paterno ever gave, with Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post, revealed a man who was seemingly at peace with the conflicts inherent in his legacy. He certainly did not come across as evil. But neither did he come across as any more aware of the truly awfulness of the situation at his beloved university and his role in allowing it to metastasize.

Paterno admitted he didn’t know how to handle the situation and that’s why he went to his bosses. It all sounded reasonable if not conveniently naïve. Paterno really had no bosses, only figureheads that had absolutely no power to control the institution within the institution that Paterno eventually became.

Paterno had long since stopped listening to his bosses anyway about how to handle problems within his football program. As the Sports Illustrated expose details, Paterno worked tirelessly to keep any misbehaving players from being punished within the context of the general university population. Having created a “we take care of our own” culture within the team, it was hardly a surprise really that Paterno’s bosses did nothing about the Jerry Sandusky allegations. If Paterno was punting, which he was, why wouldn’t they? It was, likely to their warped thinking, just a football team matter.

Now that he has passed on, there will be even further re-examining of this tragic situation in the context of the greater good that Paterno accomplished in his life. The construct of the argument advanced is whether one “incident” should wipe out nearly 5 decades of positive contributions.

It doesn’t but not because Paterno’s death demands a re-examination of the judgment rendered just a few months ago. It doesn't because the question as posed is a false one because the answer isn’t one or the other. Paterno, was every bit as complicated and conflicted as the rest of us. Iconic status and coaching achievements don’t give anyone a pass at the more difficult aspects of what we all face on a day to day basis and in the end they didn’t give Paterno a pass either, nor should they.

Running a major college football program, these days or any days, is not a task for the feint of heart or the weak of mind. Paterno could come across paternalistic in the best sense of the word but he also had enough guile to honor his Brooklyn roots well.

He didn’t want the university disciplining his players because that discipline could cost him a victory or two. Far better for him to have the players run laps or whatever other form of antiquated punishment Paterno could conger up then kick them off the team or out of the university. A coach that doesn’t win is an ex-coach.

Paterno saw football glory as a means to a better end for the university as a whole because the riches it brought did indeed enhance the overall educational experience for everyone on campus. And Paterno honored that goal with his time, his talents and his pocketbook.

But let’s not lose sight of the fact that Paterno was using the ends to justify the means. He wasn’t a cheater, like the Jackie Sherills and the Barry Switzers of the world, both of whom Paterno despised. That doesn’t mean though that Paterno didn’t cut his share of corners or manipulate the circumstances with his well earned clout in order to serve some short term needs. He did. That’s life.

Paterno’s story, his rise, his fall from grace, the constant reexamination, is the same really that has played out with Ohio State’s Jim Tressel, if only on a lesser scale and without the tragic ending.

Like Paterno, Tressel had gained a healthy dose of clout within a major university setting as a result of nearly unprecedented success on the football field. That success raised the profile and the bank account of the university. It enabled Tressel to use that clout for much good but he was always more cagey then most wanted to acknowledge. Did Tressel use that clout to achieve some short term gains? Probably, but that shouldn’t surprise.

Tressel’s explanation for his lack of response to the tattoo situation was understandable only in the context of understanding Tressel as the same kind of complex figure as Paterno. He wanted to do right by his players and his program and the university and ultimately hoped it would all sort of work out without any real repercussions.

But Tressel, like Paterno, fell to the forces of convenient outrage that only want to see every issue as a black or white choice until, of course, those same forces are faced with their own complex challenges.

It was never a question whether Tressel was a good man or not. He was. His downfall, just like Paterno’s, was that his god-like image that he helped cultivate ultimately caused those around him to punish him more harshly for his transgressions then if he had just been more upfront about his sure humaneness.

Any sort of tragedy causes a bit of self reflection in everyone else. Ultimately, though, with Paterno as with Tressel, most doing the reflecting will struggle to see the real point. It’s not that either was actually less then the sum of their parts. It’s that both were fully the some of their parts. Life is never paint-by-numbers and it is possible, indeed entirely reasonable, that a person can be both good and bad at the same time.

It was true for Paterno, certainly, and true for Tressel as well. If we're being honest with ourselves, as situations like these call for, then let's all admit, too, that it's also true for the rest of us. And perhaps that is the best lesson for us all to learn.